Demonstrators protest in Brisbane on 19 March against the West Australian government’s plan to close remote Aboriginal communities.
Photograph: Dan Peled/AAP

The Western Australian government has said it won’t be influenced by a five-year-old federal government report when deciding which Aboriginal communities to close.

The report, produced by the then Labor government in 2010, had said 192 remote communities were ineligible to sustainable development. An excerpt of the leaked report has been published by the ABC.

It sorted 287 remote Aboriginal communities in WA into four categories, beginning with 36 “town-based communities”.

Those communities, it said, generally had access to services and facilities in a nearby town and recommended investment to “facilitate the formal integration of the community into the town planning scheme” and provide equal access to services.

The remaining communities were ranked in categories A, B or C depending on the opportunities they provided for “sustainable development”.

Twenty-four larger communities, like Kalumburu on the Mitchell Plateau, which has a population of 465, Warmun, population 344, and Beagle Bay, population 308, were listed in category A as places where “preconditions for sustainable development exist”.

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A further 35 communities, including Jarlmadangah, were classed as category B, defined as “communities where many preconditions for growth exist and residents have access to most key services and limited opportunities”.

“New investment in these communities would support communities in category A in providing services to other communities in the cluster.”

The remaining 192 communities were classed in category C, “communities where there are constraints to sustainable development and opportunities for future growth are limited”.

But the sections of the report published by the ABC did not suggest shutting those communities down, instead saying “investments will be limited to sustaining existing assets and services”.

WA Aboriginal affairs minister Peter Collier told ABC radio in Perth on Wednesday that he had not seen the report until it was shown to him by the ABC.

Collier said the WA government had been making its own assessments about the sustainability of communities for 12 months. In September it signed a deal with the federal government that shunted responsibility for providing essential services to remote communities from the commonwealth to the states. In November premier Colin Barnett said between 100 and 150 of WA’s remote communities were “not viable” and faced closure.

But Collier said he believed its criteria used to assess sustainability in the 2010 federal report was “flawed”.

“The criteria for closure of those communities was to be based on population, housing and infrastructure,” he said.

“Well quite frankly, that’s appalling. If they’re going to use that criteria to close an Aboriginal community, well they need their heads read.”

Collier chairs the cabinet sub-committee tasked with figuring out the state government’s new approach to remote communities. He said the decision on closures would be based on a “much broader” set of criteria.

“It will not be done on a bland economic front in terms of dollars, it’s simply not the case,” he said.

“That’s why we must deal with this sensitively, we must deal with this appropriately, and that’s why we are taking a little time.”

Collier said no change would occur before June 2016, when the federal funding runs out, and dismissed a suggestion that population would be a determining factor, saying the decision would be made on a “case-by-case” basis.

“There will be some communities in the remote areas of the state that will be very sustainable with a small number of people … there will be other communities, larger communities, where there will be some social problems,” he said.

“And I choose Oombulgurri as an example of one of those communities. Where there are other issues with regard to child abuse, sexual abuse, rampant alcoholism … those sorts of issues must be taken into consideration.”

Oombulgurri, a community near Wyndham, was emptied and demolished last year after a coronial investigation found it had entrenched issues of child abuse, domestic violence and alcoholism.

The Barnett government has made repeated overtures to say that the decision to close communities will not be financially motivated. Barnett has repeatedly linked the issue to concerns for child welfare in Indigenous communities and last week mentioned childhood rates of sexually transmitted infections in a speech to parliament.

But former Liberal politician Fred Chaney, who was Aboriginal affairs minister under the Fraser government, told Phillip Adams on Radio National on Tuesday that it was “not true to say that there are not money questions that are driving much of this debate”.

“I’m not at all against governments carefully examining whether particular communities are viable in the sense that can they provide a decent life for the people that live in them, can the kids get an education, that’s fine,” Chaney said.

“But don’t do it unilaterally on a basis of fiscal concerns, a matter of cost-shifting between the state and the commonwealth, and a way of saving a few bucks in the budget without regard to the human beings that are going to be knocked around.”

WA Labor’s Aboriginal affairs spokesman, Ben Wyatt, said it was unimaginable that the government still hadn’t finalised its criteria for closing remote communities.

“What other community in Australia would find themselves in a position where the government of the day can say, ‘you have failed as a community, we will close you on a yet-to-be-defined set of standards’, and still to this day not be spoken to?” he said.

Wyatt said 15 months – the time until the federal funding runs out – was not enough time to develop and implement a workable solution. He said formal consultation with Indigenous leaders, which has not yet begun, ought to have begun months ago, and the relationship between the government and leadership structures in the Kimberley had now “broken down irretrievably”.

“Those communities stand there waiting for their verdict while they don’t know what they have done to appear before the Liberal government jury,” he said.